Autonorama by Peter Norton

Author:Peter Norton [Norton, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642832419
Publisher: Island Press

Health, emissions, congestion, and social equity

But is zero crashes even the right goal? Cars are a public health matter both because of the injuries and deaths that crashes cause, and because they are a primary factor in sedentary living, a major contributor to cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes.64 Where street patterns are optimized for driving, they deter walking, with consequences for health.65 Car emissions also cause or worsen asthma and other health conditions, and distribute the health hazards inequitably.66 If, eventually, all cars are electric vehicles, the power demand may compel retaining electric power plants that burn fossil fuels, which may have health implications of their own.67

In the most optimistic accounts of the AV future, collisions per vehicle mile of travel (VMT) will fall. But as horrific as the road death toll is, sedentary living is a far greater contributor to premature death. AV developers promise “seamless mobility”; that is, passengers would have door-to-door service on demand. And since passengers could use their travel time for work, play, or sleep, they may be willing to travel much farther. This in turn means that distances between destinations would grow, as decision makers adjusted to a world in which distance matters less. Hence total time sitting in vehicles would likely go up, both because car users would spend more time in vehicles, and because those who had not been car users might turn to cars as growing distances make alternatives to driving even less practical. The result would be an increase in sedentary living, and a consequent exacerbation of the health toll of sedentary living.

Declining risk per mile traveled may be offset by rising total vehicle miles of travel. Indeed, this tendency is attractive to automakers. In a 2015 report, the consultancy KPMG promised automakers that “consumers want one trillion miles of more mobility,” and that AVs could meet the demand.68 At the current US road fatality rate of 1.1 deaths per 100 million VMT, that would mean 11,000 more road deaths.69 If AVs were, say, twice as safe as conventional cars (a very optimistic estimate), the result would mean five or six thousand additional deaths each year. Fortunately, the overall content of the KPMG report gives us ample reason to doubt the validity of its conclusions. Yet even its aspirations are troubling. And because passengers would generate data as they traveled in AVs, and the data would be collected and monetized,70 tech companies would seek ways to keep passengers in cars longer, for the same reason that they found ways to keep people on their phones longer. Conventional cars have already contributed to disastrous public health trends. “Seamless mobility,” growing distances between destinations, and in-car media may accelerate the disaster.

Because safety is AV promoters’ favorite selling point, it warrants as much attention here as carbon dioxide emissions, congestion effects, and social equity together. Turning to emissions: AV developers favor electric vehicles, which have no tailpipes and hence zero tailpipe emissions. They depend on electric power grids, which in the United States are now at about 15 to 20 percent renewables.

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